Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

by Raffaello Piccoli

Croce's latest writings on history may be puzzling to the average reader because this ambiguity cannot be overcome by him unless he is willing to penetrate to the heart of Croce's doctrine, in which the word history acquires a more pregnant and fundamental meaning. In many of us there is a tendency to balk at any attempt at filling old words with deeper and more precise connotations; but philosophy is not a matter of words. A new thought will in any case alter the whole physiognomy of our vocabulary, and to stand up for the old meanings is as much as to refuse to think, or rather, to refuse to live. For history as a formal discipline, for the actual writing of history, Croce uses the word Historiography; but in his Teoria e Storia della Storiografia (Theory and History of the writing of History), history still means both the doing and the thinking, life and the consciousness of life, though not in the abstract distinction in which these meanings are generally apprehended. In Croce the distinction is also unity, and there is no doing which is not also a thinking, no life which is not also the consciousness of life, no consciousness which is not also the consciousness of itself. The ambiguity, some traces of which could still be seen in the Logica, entirely disappears in this fourth volume of the system, at least for the reader who has followed the whole development of Croce's thought.

We call contemporary history the history that is being made, rather loosely including in it a more or less extended stretch of time up to the actual present. But contemporary history rigorously ought to be only history in the actual making, the immediate present and the consciousness of the immediate present. All history, however, is contemporary history in this rigorous and precise sense; it is a condition of all history that it should live, be present in the mind of the historian; all history springs directly from present life, since only an interest of our present life can induce us to inquire into the past, which, by being made history, is no longer a past but a present. If, Croce says, "contemporaneity is not the characteristic of one class of histories (as it is held to be, and with good reasons, in an empirical classification), but the intrinsic character of all history, the relation between history and life must be conceived of as a relation of unity: not certainly in the sense of an abstract identity, but in that of a synthetic unity, which implies both the unity and the distinction of the terms. To speak of a history, of which we do not possess the documents, will then seem as absurd as to speak of the existence of a certain thing, of which we should at the same time affirm that one of the essential conditions for its existence is lacking. A history without relation with the document would be an inverifiable history; and since the reality of history lies in this verifiability, and the historical narrative in which it realizes itself is an historical narrative only in so far as it is the critical exposition of the document, a history of that kind, without meaning and without truth, would be inexistent as history. How could ever a history of painting be composed by a man who should not see and enjoy the works of which he intends to describe critically the origin and development? How, a history of philosophy, without the works, or at least the fragments of the works of the philosophers? How, the history of a feeling or a custom, for instance, of Christian humility or of chivalresque honour, without the capacity to re-live, or rather, without actually re-living those particular states of mind? On the other hand, having established the indissoluble connection of life and thought in history, the doubts that have been advanced about the certainty and utility of history suddenly and totally disappear, and it becomes almost impossible to understand them. How could that ever be uncertain, which is a present product of our spirit? How could a knowledge be useless, which solves a problem rising from the womb of life?"[1]

If history is thus regarded not as an object but as an activity, not as the irrevocable past but as the living present, the difference between history and chronicle, which is one of the puzzles of historical thought, becomes an important and significant distinction. We are used to think that the original form of historical writing is the chronicle, and history a later and maturer development. Now if history is the consciousness of a present, it follows that history is contemporary with the event; that, therefore, the most meagre chronicle, in the mind of its writer, moved by the actuality of the facts which he records, is already a history in the full sense of the word. And the records of the past, whether appearing to us, from a literary point of view, as mere chronicles or as true histories, become history again whenever they are apprehended by a new mind as an answer to a present problem, partaking of the activity of the mind that thinks them anew. The same records, on the other hand, are a mere chronicle, an empty narrative, a truly irrevocable past, whenever they are not re-lived by a living mind, either because they do not correspond to any interest of present life, or because the essential conditions for the recreation of that past, the documents which enable us to revive within ourselves the original experience, are irrevocably lost. The true distinction between history and chronicle is not, therefore, a literary or material one, but a distinction between forms of spiritual activity: history is the living consciousness, and, therefore, an act of thought or knowledge; chronicle is the dead record, which we preserve by a mere act of will, because we know that some day the dead record itself may come back to life, transform itself again, under an impulse rooted not in the past but in the present, into a living thought.

"These revivals have purely inward motives; and no amount of narratives or documents can produce them; on the contrary, it is the inner motive that gathers and brings before itself documents and narratives, which, without it, would remain dispersed and inert. And it will be for ever impossible to understand the effectual process of historical thought, unless one starts from the principle that the spirit itself is history, and, in every one of its moments, the maker of history and at the same time the result of all foregoing history; so that the spirit carries within itself the whole of its history, which in fact coincides with the spirit itself. To forget one aspect of history and to remember another is nothing but the rhythm of the life of the spirit, which works by determining and individualizing itself, and by in-determining and dis-individualizing the preceding determinations and individualizations, in order to create new and richer ones. The spirit would live over again, so to speak, its history, even without those external objects which we call narratives and documents; but those external objects are instruments that it fashions for itself, and preparatory acts that it accomplishes, in order to effect that vital interior evocation, in whose process they resolve themselves. And for this purpose the spirit asserts and jealously preserves the 'memories of the past.'"[2]

This practical function of the preservation of the dead documents and records is the work of the pure scholar, of the erudite, the archivist, the archæologist, or what might be termed philology in the strict sense of the word. And it is a legitimate and useful function, provided that it does not pretend to be other than it actually is, and to substitute itself for the true process of history, by attempting to make history with the external objects that have been confided to its care. Philological histories are never anything but mere compilations, learned chronicles, useful repertories; and as such, blameless; but as histories they lack the living spirit, the creative impulse, which alone can transform the document into history. We have only to turn our attention to the greatest part of our modern histories of literature, whether written by a single philologist or by a learned society, to realize that that which is philology in them is not history, but repertory; and the rest, which is history, is not philology, but a vivid reaction, an act of present life, by which some at least of the documents of the past (since some philologists are men) have suddenly become part of the actual experience of the writer, answered his spiritual need, stirred that which is still human in his soul. And if a further confirmation of the philological error is needed, and of the further errors in which it involves the philological historian, it is sufficient to open those same literary histories at the pages in which they attempt to explain the origins of the Renaissance. Because as those writers make history from the sources, so they imagine that life itself springs from material sources; and the Renaissance finds its causes in the discovery of monuments and documents of the classical world, in the lives and travels of humanists, in the munificence of popes and princes. It does not seem to occur to them that monuments and manuscripts, which materially had existed in Europe during all the so-called Dark and Middle Ages, could not have been discovered unless, at a certain moment in the development of European civilization, the spirit of the Western nations had not craved those particular helps to its own life, because of motives and impulses generated by its own actual experience; and that the mediæval clericus was not less of a traveller than the humanist, and that the economic aspect of life can never be intelligibly conceived as a cause of that life of which it is but a moment. For the philological historian, the Renaissance begins between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century; but the historian tout court knows that the fundamental impulses and motives by which we empirically ally characterize that period in the history of the human spirit were already present in the Italy of the thirteenth century, and slowly maturing in the other European countries long before any of the Italian humanists had come to them as the apostles of a new creed.

If philological history is not history but pseudo-history, so are also two other forms of so-called historical thought, poetical history and rhetorical history. The first substitutes for the value of history, which is thought, a purely immediate and sentimental, or æsthetic value; it presents itself very often as a reaction to philological history, but it falls into the opposite error, which is that of putting the imagination in the place of the document. Rhetorical history is that which is animated by practical ends (moralistic, nationalistic, or other), and it really consists of two distinct elements, history itself, and the particular end towards which the recitation of history is directed, converging into a single practical act. Both partake of life much more intensely than philological history; but the life of the one is poetry, that of the other is economic or moral action. They are, therefore, legitimate as poetry and as action, and become errors only in so far as they are presented as history. It is important to make this distinction as clear as possible: the actual interest which makes history is not for Croce a sentimental or practical interest, but an interest of thought. In the distinction of the various forms of spiritual activity, history is not the sentimental or practical moment, but the moment of ultimate consciousness, the reflection and not either the intuition or the action, the thought which is consciousness of life and not life immediate; neither art nor morality, in a word, but philosophy, if by philosophy, we mean not a formal discipline, but all knowledge sub specie universalis. The defenders of rhetorical history have become more frequent during and after the war than they were before it, it being only too natural that in times of exceptional stress truth should be made subservient to practical ends, and the man of knowledge should be unwittingly transmogrified into a man of action; and they insist more than ever on the moral efficacy of history as its proper educational value. But "if by history we mean both that history which is thought, and those that are poetry, philology or moral will, it is clear that 'history' will enter into the educational process not under one only, but under all these forms; though as history proper, under one only, which is not that of moral education, exclusively and abstractly considered, but of the education or development of thought."[3]

The conception of history as contemporary history, or present thought, helps us to discard that form of historical scepticism, or agnosticism, which affirms that all we can know of history is but one part, and a very small part, of the whole. If we should imagine that infinite whole, in its infinite detail, as present for one moment to our mind, all we could do, would be instantly to proceed to forget it, in order to concentrate our attention on that detail only which answers to a problem and, therefore, constitutes a living and active history. That whole is not something of which we can affirm the existence at any given moment, but the eternal phantasm of the thing in itself, the limiting concept of the infinity of our doing and knowing: a naturalistic construction similar to the external and material reality of physical science. It is this naturalistic process that gives birth to agnosticism, in history as in science; that is, to the affirmation of the impossibility of knowing that which has no reality outside our own thought, which has created, or rather posited it, for its own purposes. A further consequence is that we must renounce the knowledge of universal history, not as a fact, because as such it has never existed, but as a pretence under which, in fact, we are given something quite different. The pretence consists (and it will be well to recall Croce's own words, written long before some recent attempts, which in those words find their precise valuation) in "reducing within a single frame all the facts of mankind, from its origins on earth to the present day; or rather, since in this way history would not be truly universal, from the origins of things or from the Creation to the end of the world; hence a tendency to fill the abysm of prehistory or of the origins with theological or naturalistic novels, and somehow to outline the future, either with revelations or with prophecies, as in the Christian universal history (which extended to the Anti-Christ and to the universal judgment), or with forecasts, as in the universal histories of positivism, democraticism, and socialism. Such is the pretence; but the fact turns out to be different from the intention, and what we get is either a more or less heterogeneous chronicle, or a poetical history expressing some aspiration of the heart, or even a true history, which is not universal but particular, though embracing the life of many nations and of many epochs; and, more often, in the same literary body we discern these divers elements, one by the side of the other."[4]

Universal history is a utopian ideal similar to those of a universal language, or of universal art, or of a law that should be valid for all times; the only useful meaning of the word universal when applied to history is that of a recommendation to enlarge the sphere of our historical interests, and to turn from the knowledge of one time and one people to that of the great facts and currents of history. But a denial of the validity of universal history must not be understood as withdrawing from history the knowledge of the universal. The reader who has followed us through the preceding chapters, and especially through our analysis of the historical judgment, knows how the concreteness and individuality of history is determined by thought, and therefore known as a universal. History is thought, and, as such, the thought of the universal in its concrete and particular determinations. The object of history is never this or that poet, but poetry; not this or that nation or epoch, but culture, civilization, progress, freedom, or a similar word which denotes the development of the human spirit as a whole, and is therefore a universal. It is of history, thus conceived, of contemporary history, as opposed to the naturalistic moment (chronicle, or philological history), that Croce asserts the identity with philosophy: history as, the knowledge of the eternal present being one with the thought of the eternal present, which is philosophy. History renounces the pretence of an objective universality in the same way as philosophy, immanent in and identical with history, abolishes the idea of a universal philosophy: the two negations are but one, since the closed system, the final truth, is as much a cosmological novel as universal history is. "This tendency was implicit in Hegel's philosophy, but contrasted within it by old prejudices, and wholly betrayed in the execution, so that even that philosophy converted itself into a cosmological novel; we can therefore say that that which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a mere presentiment, only at the beginning of the twentieth is transforming itself into a firm consciousness, which defies the fears of the timid, that in this way we endanger the knowledge of the universal; maintaining that, on the contrary, in this way only this knowledge is obtained truly and for ever, because in a dynamic mode. History becoming actual history, and philosophy becoming historical philosophy, have freed themselves, one from the dread of not being able to know that which is not known only because either it was or it will be known, and the other, from the despair of never attaining the final truth: that is, both have freed themselves from the phantasm of the 'thing in itself.'"[5]

This final affirmation of the unity of human thought, this qualification of all thought as at the same time historical and philosophical, is the last answer given by Croce to the problem which had occupied him for the last twenty years, ever since his first speculations on history as art. From the consideration of the individual moment which is essential to history, he had slowly raised himself to the contemplation of the pure universal, only to return finally to the individual moment in which only the universal realizes itself. And while this answer can be regarded, on the whole, as the natural conclusion of the idealistic movement in philosophy, yet it differs from Kant in its ultimate repudiation of the noumenon, from Hegel, in that it makes it impossible to build, side by side with a dynamic logic, a mythology of the Idea, a philosophy of history and of nature, in which the transcendental element, eliminated already from the logic, should find its ultimate refuge. It is to be hoped that Croce's critics will not level against him those same criticisms that are generally employed against Kant or Hegel, because they would be for the most part ineffectual against a Kantian and Hegelian philosopher who has discarded the whole of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics. From this standpoint, Croce is not only the heir of the idealistic, but also of the positivistic or realistic tradition, which he has constantly opposed, not because of its anti-metaphysical character, but because in the external reality of the realist, in the natural or historical philosophy of the positivist, he is unable to see anything but naturalistic disguises of the old metaphysical entities. A realist who should not in principle refuse to become acquainted with Croce's thought, but honestly attempt to understand it, would probably find his own realism purified and made more truly realistic by the experience.